Making sense of precarity: talking about economic insecurity with millennials in Canada

ABSTRACT

While there are many effective metrics for quantifying economic precarity, talking to young people about their experiences in the labour and housing markets reveals a gap in explanatory language around living in/through crisis. In particular, in my research with Canadian millennials (born from the early 1980s through the mid-90s), although they could state the facts about how hard it is to get a good job or afford decent housing, what this pervasive sense of insecurity feels like is much harder to put into words. For many, a generalized sense of precariousness invades everyday life, even when work and housing are relatively secure. Thinking through this sense of anxiety, that the future might not be any better than the present and that young people might not be as well off as their parents, leads to a generational understanding of economic crisis – and for a group of young adults who came of age during the downturn of 2008–2009, examining how they talk (or cannot talk) about precarity is revealing.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• millennials
• work
• interviews
• Canada

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Sonya Scott, who organized the colloquium where an earlier version of this essay was presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Nancy Worth is a feminist Economic Geographer at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research takes an identities approach to focus on issues of social justice and equity—the lived experience of the economic. From her work with young people on school to work transitions to more recent projects with young adults on precarious work and co-residence with parents, her research centers on how age intersects with other social categories of difference, across space at various scales (including the workplace, home and the city)—understanding economic processes through the people who experience them.

ORCID

Nancy Worth http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2379-526X

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant 430-2015-00637.